The night of Sept. 10, my 5-month- old daughter slept through the night for the first time. I hadn't listened to the news while I was getting ready or driving to work. I walked into my child's day-care classroom and proudly announced that she had slept through the night. The caregivers could only offer a smile. They told me about the disaster.

* * *

George, in the air, mostly

I was in a classroom reading my favorite book when the man who takes me places came up and whispered in my ear. He said something very bad had happened, but that I shouldn't worry, and to just act like everything was okay. I was scared, because I thought maybe I had done something wrong, or maybe something bad was going to happen to me now! So I just sat there, not saying anything for a while, 'cause I couldn't think of anything to say.

Then the man came up again and said, "We have to leave now," so I read something off a card he handed me, and then we got into the big black car, and the police and army guys made sure we got to the airport real fast (they all used their sirens -- I like it when they use their sirens!).

When we got on the plane, Uncle Dick was on the phone, and he told me some bad people had flown some planes into a big building in New York, and into the army guys' headquarters in Washington. I got real scared then, because I was in an airplane! I started to cry, and Uncle Dick got real mad at me and told me to act like a man, but I couldn't stop crying.

Then he said the Air Force pilots were bringing me back to Washington, and I really started crying, 'cause one plane had already crashed there and maybe we would, too! Uncle Dick told me to give the phone to the spy guy, and they talked for a while, and then the spy guy gave me a big glass of medicine and told me to drink it all the way down. It was pretty good -- I like the medicine they give me!

So we flew around for a long time, which was kind of neat, and then we landed at a big army base, and even though I'd had about four glasses of medicine, I started to get nervous, cause didn't that army base in Washington get hit by a plane? Then the army guys took me into a little room with a TV camera, and they handed me some pages to read, only I was so nervous and frightened, it took me a bunch of times before I finally was able to read them halfway decent. The TV guy said they would just cut out the bad parts and keep in the good stuff, plus he said "no problemo" to me, which is one of my favorite words! I like being on TV!

Then we got back on the airplane, and the man who takes me places said, "Now we're going back to Washington," and I started crying again, but the doctor gave me a shot that made me really sleepy, and when I woke up, it was the next day! I slept really good that night, I guess!

A few days later, they gave me some more medicine, and then we went to the place where the buildings were blown up, and I got to talk through a bullhorn! It was really neat!

* * *

Ron Ih, Cavite, the Philippines

My wife and I were in Asia on vacation and staying at her mother's in Cavite, a suburb of Manila. I wasn't feeling well, so I went to bed early that night.

About two hours later, at around 9:30 pm Manila time (9:30 am New York time), my wife came running up the stairs, shook me out of bed and said, "Oh, my God, you have to see this." We were watching the English-language news channel, and it was showing the latest footage of the Twin Towers. We watched, stunned, for hours and saw both towers collapse.

We were supposed to return to the United States on Sept. 14, but that obviously wasn't going to happen, so we managed to work a few connections we had at Philippine Airlines to get us home as soon as possible. When we managed to get a flight on Sept. 18, airport security was extremely tight, and they wouldn't let anyone without a boarding pass onto the terminal grounds, so we had to say good-bye on the curb. After landing at SFO, I can't remember a time when I was more happy to be back home.

My television is my alarm clock. At 6 am, 15 minutes after the first tower was struck, my TV came alive with images of smoke and screaming. In my groggy state, I thought it was a movie review. I went to the bathroom. I returned to see a second explosion erupting from the towers. I heard Matt Lauer exclaim that another plane had crashed. "Why is he on at this hour?" I first thought, and then I knew this was real.

My boyfriend and I sat on the bed, half dressed and dazed, watching the replay of the attacks while the rest of the house slept. I live with three other women, all in our early 20s, and why I didn't immediately wake them, I can't explain. Even after I heard their early-morning rustlings (unlike me, they all have traditional alarm clocks, and were thus unaware), I couldn't bring myself to tell them. But when the first tower fell, I flew down the hall, shouting, "Turn on your TV! New York's been attacked. The towers are falling."

Hysteria. One housemate, a transplant from Boston, tried to locate a friend who works at the World Financial Center, and she asked me, "Is that the same as the WTO?" Being a West Coast native I couldn't answer. Another's father works on a military base in England, and she couldn't get an international connection.

Soon, we gathered downstairs, where we remained for most of the day, watching. Around noon, I decided to make for my office in Menlo Park. To avoid driving downtown and past the airport, I cut through West Portal and took 280 south.

From the hills of San Bruno I couldn't help but look down over the airport. A sky usually filled with the motion of takeoffs and landing, was empty, frozen. It might have been beautiful, a perfect California day, but to me it seemed unnatural, menacing. I've never felt fear so strongly as when I looked out to the East Bay hills and wondered whether there were more planes, out of view, heading who knows where. The two F-16s streaking by provided little comfort.

There was no fog when I got up. It was clear, and I could tell it was going to be a sunny morning already at 6:15 am. I got ready as usual, showering, shaving, making coffee, and logged onto AOL Instant Messenger and the Web to read comics and chat with my friends on the East Coast.

The first message I got was, "Did you see what happened?" from my friend in Manhattan. I had not. I turned on the TV, and of course it took only seconds to see what had happened. I woke up my wife, Jenn, and told her. We both were stunned, and we couldn't take our eyes off the television.

Within half an hour after we turned the TV on, the first tower collapsed. There wasn't much to say except what everyone else everywhere said: "I can't believe this is happening."

All this time, I was logged onto AIM, talking with my friend in Manhattan. In fact, I was the only person she could reach. Her phone service worked, but only locally. No long distance. Her cell phone -- well, we know why that quit working.

We were lucky that our friend was far enough away that she wasn't hurt, but our conversations online that night showed how scared she was. She still was unable to call anyone long distance or through her cell phone. She was also scared because the smell from the collapsed towers permeated the whole of Lower Manhattan and the East Village, where she lives.

I arrived at work, usual time. Just after 9 am, my girlfriend, (now fiancée) called, sounding slightly shaken. "A plane crashed into the World Trade Center," she said. I immediately remembered a documentary on the History Channel about a small plane ramming into the Empire State Building back in the '40s. No big deal, right? It's weird, but I don't actually remember being told a second plane, thus a sure terrorist attack, had crashed. It's as if I've blocked it out.

On an average day, my technical-help desk fields about 40-50 calls. That day I got only 6, for obvious reasons. At about 2 in the afternoon, I talked to a man from Indiana who said he'd been out working in his yard all day. He didn't even know what had happened. I envied him. He was in a part of the world I wished I'd been in -- a part that didn't know about any of this. My place in his life would be much more morbid, for I became the one who told him what occurred. I tried to do so with compassion.

* * *

Wendy, New York, NY

I was in 3 World Financial Center, directly across from the World Trade Center. My colleagues and I stood on West Street watching people plunge from the windows; my husband, who worked in a neighboring building, was nearly suffocated in the debris; one man from our company was killed. Life has moved on, but I'm appalled that many people outside of New York and Washington seem to want to put this out of their minds. I guess you have to personally witness 3,000 people being murdered to thoroughly understand the horror. To other people, it's just something on TV.

* * *

Scott Apostolou, Brooklyn, NY

I had just dropped my daughter off at school and was walking back home in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. We lived direcly across the the East River from the Twin Towers in a neighborhood that is predominantly three- and four-story brownstones. As I was walking down my block, I first noticed something odd about the sky. There were individual sheets of paper floating high in the air. That day was a primary election day in New York, and my first thought was that some candidate was dropping leaflets. But what I realized later as some of the papers fell into the front yard of my building was that these were pages from books, stationery, invoices -- all with World Trade Center address.

Noticing me looking up at the sky, someone walking past me suggested that I go to the end of the block. When I did, there it was. The first tower had been hit a few minutes before. From it rose a thick column of smoke that, thanks to the wind, was blowing directly toward us. One thing I remember about that day and for a few days afterward was that there wasn't a cloud in the sky. The only thing in the sky was the smoke from the still-burning buildings. As terrible as it was to see it in person and then have it repeated over and over again on television, what was far worse for me was the sounds of that day. When the first tower collapsed, it made a low, rumbling sound that went on and on and seemed like it would never stop. For days, if not weeks, afterward, I would flinch whenever I heard a truck go over a pothole or any other kind of low, rumbling sound. My family left New York to relocate to California exactly 100 days after the attacks. I remember the headlines in all of the papers that day, announcing that finally the fires at the World Trade Center site had finally been put out.

* * *

Thomas J. Rogers, Concord, CA

After a night of fabulous lovemaking, my girlfriend woke up early and took off for work. A little after 6 am, she called me and told me to turn on my radio. She described the first airplane hitting the tower. I was shocked and incredulous.

I got ready and went to work like on any other day. I was sure everyone on the bus had heard the news, but it was eerily quiet during that ride. When I got to the office, my co-workers were watching that horrifying video sequence on TV. After we stared blankly at each other for a spell, my boss sent us home.

My vagabond brother was living with me at the time, but the apartment was empty that afternoon. I was restless and went out driving around. I found myself praying at a Catholic church for the first time in a few years.

I was working on my master's in transformational learning at the time. Later in September, we had one of our monthly cohort weekend gatherings in San Francisco. We made a space to share our emotions and reactions to the recent tragedy.

Imagine 20 peaceniks and social activists in a room together venting -- we shouted angrily, we wept, we held each others' hands. We were very worried that people would take this act of terrorism and use it to fuel further racism and warmongering. We were right to be worried.

Trauma tends to bring out the best and the worst in people. There were many incredible stories of heroism that came out of New York a year ago. Then there were stories of racist hate crimes. On one hand, 9/11 forced millions of people to reconsider their values. Some folks decided to change careers or spend more time with family. On the other hand, 9/11 has been used shamelessly by corporate marketers to pitch us everything from bigger cars to smaller security devices.

Foreign peoples want to strike out against America because of the way we show up on the international scene. We show up as arrogant and imperialistic. Our agenda is always to preserve our overly consumptive way of life. Ultimately, this tragedy served as a jolting wake-up call to the people of this country. The question now is, are we really going to wake up?

* * *

Cheryl Kohler, Tucson, AZ

My mother called me and woke me up right after the second plane hit. I climbed out of bed, turned on the TV and didn't move again for what seemed like hours. We lived a block from the University of Arizona, and many of our neighbors were college kids who were there without their parents or families.

One of our favorites, Jeremy, came to the door and asked whether he could sit with me and watch; he didn't want to be alone. My husband called from work, got an update on the news and said he couldn't deal with hearing any more at that moment.

We had moved to Tucson from Berkeley a year ago and were in love with the lushness of the desert and the incredible heat and the laid-back, friendly, progressive college neighborhood. After Sept. 11, Tucson exploded in hate. Women attending peace vigils at the university were physically attacked by both men and women. Rocks and bottles were thrown at the Muslim children's center near the college. A Sikh man in nearby Mesa was murdered. My husband, who worked for a progressive lesbian couple, was fired for voicing just a hint of dissent. The peacenik, bike-riding, ponytailed college kids turned out to have guns under their beds. We put everything we owned in the front yard, had a huge garage sale and came back to Berkeley.